A dying United Nations

World leaders are in New York for the next few days to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the United Nations. Sadly, this celebration is overshadowed by the fact that the United Nations is a dying organization, with little hope for revival.

The United Nations (UN) was founded amongst the ashes of World War II. The victorious powers, especially the United States, believed that a stable and functioning international body would best preserve their interests.

This had been attempted earlier, following World War I, with an organization known as the League of Nations. The League was a bold idea but doomed to failure, in large part because the United States — then gripped with isolationist fervor — had refused to join.

After World War II, however, the world looked much differently than it did in 1919 or even today: Europe and Japan had been destroyed, the Soviet Union did not pose much of a threat, a Western-leaning autocrat named Chiang Kai-Shek was leader of China, and most everywhere else was under colonial rule. And, perhaps most importantly, the United States was the only country in the world whose words were backed with nuclear weapons. No country, in the history of civilization, has ever been as powerful as the United States in 1945.

Because the UN claimed to speak for “all peoples,” the United States realized that having a UN — especially one that would rubber stamp American action — would give legitimacy to United States hegemonic rule.

It it this logic that has kept the United States committed to a functioning UN for more than 50 years. When it could get UN approval of its military adventures — as with the Korean War and the First Gulf War — the United States benefitted from a “multinational” gloss that helped mask its imperialism. And where UN approval was lacking — as with Vietnam, Yugoslavia, and the Second Gulf War – the United States simply did what it wanted anyway.

Yet since 2000 and the election of the Bush Administration, the United States has withdrawn its backing from the UN, effectively crippling it as a workable organization. The United States has torn up multilateral treaties and rejected negotiation as a tool of international diplomacy (the current Ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, has famously remarked, “I don’t do carrots”).

The contempt for the UN became glaringly obvious to the run-up for the Second Gulf War. The Bush Administration attempted to get a vote from the Security Council that would authorize the use of force against Saddam Hussein. They sent Colin Powell to the Security Council, who gave his now infamous speech concerning the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. “We know that Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction, is determined to make more,” he remarked. When it looked like the Security Council would not pass a resolution, the US invaded anyway.

The United States is the foundation of the UN, and without American support, the organization cannot not function.  By discarding the UN, the United States has torn up the very international structure that has preserved its power for the last 60 years.

Why destroy something that benefits you? The only feasible explanation is ideological.  Just as a racist might refuse treatment from a doctor not of his skin color, so the ideologues now in power refuse to believe that any organization where other perspectives are voiced might actually be useful to their schemes of global conquest.

And, just as the racist ultimately suffers for his intransigence, the delusions of the current leadership produce horrible systemic consequences. The absence of a stable international forum, even one as basic as the UN, means that leaders will pursue narrow self-interested goals instead of ones that might benefit the entire globe.  Issues that can only be tackled at a planet-wide level — the spread of nuclear weapons, transborder disease (AIDS and bird flu come to mind), climate change, poverty — will not be dealt with.

The UN’s lapse into a deep institutional coma condemns the inhabitants of this planet to a period of great global instability. Just as a defunct League of Nations watched helplessly as nations prepared for war, so today is the UN helpless as an agent of global stability.  Like a modern-day Cassandra, the UN remains cognizant and vocal concerning the probable (and bloody) meltdown of the global system but ultimately powerless in convincing others that change is desperately needed.  Its demise as an organization should leave us with a tremendous sense of sadness and foreboding.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 14th, 2005 at 5:43 pm and is filed under International Relations, Structure and System. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.